Interrogating the Puzzling Relationship Between Black ‘Race’ and White Ancestries
Black ‘Race’ and White Supremacy Saga seeks to interrogate the puzzling and paradoxical relationship that has existed for ages between the Black ‘race’ and White ancestries. Humanity, as we know it, has had the umbrella of imperfection hovering over its head, and this is not letting up. Imperfection is the biological twin sister of frailty. With frailty comes weakness from the bottom up, making it almost impossible for human creatures to despise their kind because of the short-sightedness of the lens that is employed as the measuring tape for success and survival. Humanity emerged as a different species from all other species in East Africa 70,000 years ago.
Migration to other parts of the world since then made the pigmentation and melanin constitution of those who remained on the continent and those who left for far-off lands different, thereby creating ancestries like the Black race, White/Caucasian ancestry, and Brown and Yellow ancestries.
To be born Black means you have been baked in the oven of rejection by those claiming to have manufactured that oven.
As a result, the tension when these groups meet has been exacerbated by the gulf of lack of contact that had fragmented these groups. This book dwells more on that. Racism, a socio-cultural construct and not a biological makeup of the human species on Earth, has fueled the debate over “White Supremacy” and what it all entails. In short, it has created what I have termed “physio-cultural and psycho-mental fragmentations.”
These fragmentations have grown by geometrical progression, and since globalization or territorial mergers have brought all of humanity together to circulate and rejoin each other’s dominion, this has exacerbated this socio-cultural construct of affinity between them called “racism.” A process of dehumanization and de-dignifying the ‘Other’ to claim superiority and power influence.
This has made the relationship equation between the ancestries tilt towards xenophobia. The relationship between the Black ‘race’ and its white ancestral lineage has been the subject of most historical writings since the 15th century when there was official contact between them during the era of transatlantic slavery.
The Myth of Sisyphus: Black and White Human Species at Odds
This book interrogates the silent elephant in the room as to why the Black and White human species on planet Earth have inherently been at odds with each other. Why has the attainment of love and peace become the myth of Sisyphus for their existence on Earth? It would appear violence and pain were baked in the cave of our birth such that no escape route was predetermined.
This book documents the achievements of the Black race.
The secretion of higher dopamine levels when violence and pain are triggered to the utter satisfaction of the perpetrator shows the predispositions that have been ingrained within the four walls of our white and red blood cells between Whites and Blacks.
The fact that Derek Chauvin is smiling while he is in the slow process of choking George Floyd to death with his knee on his neck during the 2020 race riots in the United States venerates the omnipresence of the passive monstrosity ingrained within them. The deafening silence that is manifested by onlookers in the face of horror has exposed the seeds of indifference that have been planted for centuries. The canopy of human shame in the face of tragedy has been erected by those who feel that justice ought to rear its head for peace and violence to cease, but they have no control over the destiny of the canopy.
Black People Saga
To be born Black means you have been baked in the oven of rejection by those claiming to have manufactured that oven. These people who don’t physically look Black, by and large, have assumed the overriding gift of hegemony and supremacy.
The Black person is faced with scorn and pity with perpetual filth thrown at him/her once he/she has migrated out of the continent of Africa.
It appears all other ancestries have been advertently and inadvertently schooled formally and informally to despise Blackness and Black people because they’ve been cursed (from a biblical standpoint) and otherwise to occupy the lowliest ladder of human hierarchy of dignity.
While visiting post-Apartheid South Africa for the first time at the end of 2023, I was awestruck at how Cape Town was a direct replica of my mind’s eye. It represented what I had envisioned. The Coloreds’ living standards were more elevated than that of the Blacks. The Afrikaans (White South Africans) living standards were higher than the Coloreds (Indians) and, of course, the Blacks.
The fact that millions of people of African descent were stripped of their cultural affinities with Africa is one of the issues discussed in the book.
The Blacks lived in shanty, segregated neighborhoods where living standards were deplorable with a lack of basic needs that could be found in the residences of the Coloreds and the White South Africans. In Stellenbosch, the story could not be different. The question that quickly jammed my mind was, why was this even possible when the Blacks were the original landlords?
The situation of the Native Indians in America when Christopher Columbus came there, found them there, but claimed to have founded America, also resonated in my mind. The fact that millions of people of African descent, especially those heavily populated in Brazil, were stripped of their cultural affinities with Africa is one of the issues discussed in the book.
White Supremacy Saga
This book has been able to examine various interrelated scenarios, including the conceptual and practical implications of the term “White Supremacy” that has generated intense debates in the last two decades. Born under the painful and often misinterpreted symbolism of racism mostly in the United States after the transatlantic slave trade, White Americans reduced the dignity of Black people from the continent of Africa to nothingness.
They systematically carried out inferiorization processes of Black people, first by chaining them under the belly of the ship that transported them to the New World to toil and moil for them in the plantations.
This book has zeroed in on the pre-modern, modern, and postmodern contextual realities of people of African descent.
The spinelessness and the extreme cruelty exhibited by those who undertook this process have become the litmus test of how Blacks have been perceived and related to in this world for the last 400 years and counting.
The fact that their languages, cultures, and other forms of identity were stripped from them once they were dumped in the Americas, Latin America, and the Caribbean only goes to demonstrate their attempt at reclaiming the title of supremacy over the Black race.
Post-Emancipation Struggles and Achievements
This book explains how, even after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln, no plans were put in place to integrate them after the horrendous and most disdainful evil of slavery that had plagued them since 1619.
They were discarded and left to fend for themselves in a land with no rights to vote, own property, earn a living, or even feed themselves. They wandered aimlessly in North America waiting for charity from the very enslavers or chose to go back to voluntarily serve as a slave once more. This book documents the achievements of the Black race, beginning with the fact that mankind as we know it began in Africa and that the historical towering supremacy of Black erudition that began in Kemet, now Egypt, has not been accorded its rightful place in history.
There has been a systematic attempt at rewriting history to dislodge and disregard the great achievements of Africa during the pre-Arabic slavery, pre-European slavery, and colonization. This book has unearthed the forgotten epistemological treasures of people of the African continent by going back to 146 BCE when the Romans renamed the continent ‘Africa’ thereby disarming her from her original name of ‘Alkebulan,’ which the people of Nubia still call it today.
This book has zeroed in on the pre-modern, modern, and postmodern contextual realities of people of African descent from Africa, North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The question that continues to hover in the psycho-mental space of the reader as he or she immerses himself or herself in the various scenarios interrogated in the text is, whither do we go from here?
As the reader interrogates the various conundrums between the Black ‘race’ and the White ancestry in the book based on the evidence presented, where does the judgment to ascribe superiority and inferiority really lie in this 21st century? The answer to this question may not really be blowing in the wind but actually on the various pages of the book.
